How is the Romantic construction of the Sublime reflected in
the ideological, conceptual and linguistic construction of the texts under
consideration in this Romanticism reader?
You can look here at Blake's Songs, Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, Byron's Manfred and Frankenstein...
Afternoon all, I thought I’d have a look at the sublime element(s) of Percy Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.
ReplyDeleteThe romantic period gave birth to creativity and gave authors/poets the freedom to explore what was perceived as ‘different’ at the time. I think the sublime element in Shelley’s piece is his imagination. The ideology of using his imagination allowed him to use personification, imagery and the ‘supernatural’ to convey the theme of nature and in-particular the powerful (majestic) wind.
Shelley gives the wind a human characteristic by calling the wind ‘her’ and ‘she’ indicating the wind is female and has similar qualities as a woman, ‘Her clarion over the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill (Shelley, 1820, V.I);’ this sounds like a woman nurturing her garden with love, care and un-relenting devotion. During this period women were mainly raised to be home makers and take care of the family with the qualities described above - much like the wind caring for the earth in Shelley’s poem. There are lots more examples of personification throughout the poem.
Shelley's imagination portrays the ‘West Wind’ like a supernatural entity that has the power to take away the dead things and create new things, ‘O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’ (Shelley, 1820, V.I) . I think the decomposing (dying/dead) leaves are Shelley’s view of the negative aspects of the society he lives in and this strong, powerful wind acts like a cleanser. The wind could be viewed like the preserver of mankind (total speculation here), it has the power to create life but it also can destroy life and take it away.
‘Combined with technical competence, powerful thought and emotion produce the ‘true sublime’, in works which ‘uplift our soles’, fill us with ‘proud exaltation and a sense of vaunting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we had heard’ (Pateman, 2004, P.192). Pateman sums up my thoughts towards ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and why this poem by Shelley can be considered as the ‘true sublime’. Through the use of Shelley’s sublime imagination and conventional techniques he has been able to convey the world he’s living in through the use of nature. He uses a natural element like wind to carry his own thoughts, fears and views. With my limited poetry experience I think it is an original and brilliant concept.
looking at the Blake's songs of innocence and experience the introduction, we can see similar attempts to humanify nature as he goes on about how he saw a child in the cloud and that child started talking to him asking him to play a cheerful song:
ReplyDelete"Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me.
Pipe a song about a Lamb:
So I piped with merry chear,
Piper pipe that song again—
So I piped, he wept to hear."
also in the introduction of the songs of experience we can see many human-expressions used to describe nature:
"O Earth O Earth return!
Arise from out the dewy grass;
Night is worn,
And the morn
Rises from the slumberous mass."
Hi guys
ReplyDeleteAdnan for the first poem you mention I don't think that there is much attempt if at all to humanize nature (I'm assuming that's what you meant by humanify). The only mention of nature in the part of the poem is the cloud that the child is sitting on. There is no attempt to give emotions or feelings to the cloud it is simply what the child is sitting on, the conversation so far as I can tell is happening between the child on the cloud and someone else.
Also I don't like the idea of humanizing nature, I see nature as an unrelenting amoral force, making it more human diminishes these inherent qualities (for me anyway). I prefer The "Naturizing of humans" if that makes any sense.
As Shane said in regard to Shelley's Ode to the West Wind
"Shelley gives the wind a human characteristic by calling the wind ‘her’ and ‘she’ indicating the wind is female and has similar qualities as a woman"
To me this is a sort of middle ground and I am perfectly happy with this, however to me it is saying that women have similar qualities to Wind, of course this is just my opinion.
I agree with what Shane has stated about teh fact that authors/poets in the romantic period had the freedom to express their imagination into the texts, using the linguistic features of personification, the ‘supernatural’ to convey the theme of nature. This is an another aspect that is used to provoke audiences' interest I really like how the imaginary scenes are used.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea how the wind is portratied as the woman yes indeed it's true about the fact that wind is sweeping across the earth as protecting and caring of the earth..and the woman is also seen as a soft minded person who plays a huge role in the protection of the family. Very well written with an indepth imagination..however, at the beginning, I thought the wind is the man..not female, becasue men also have the capabilities to look after the garden..and children...like what females do, this sort of tells the fact that the author has some kind of stereotype or fixed perspective or views about the role of female and male..
well, hayden, in blake's poem he adresses the earth and starts calling for it to return and so he humanizes it .. i think thats pretty obvious.. and i have to disagree with you , i think it would be fascinating if you could give a personality to nature,as thats is one of the most popular methods to decribe the sublime nature that is all around us, and i believe that can only be done if we describe it to be more human-like. just like we always try to give that feeling of nature to personality i think the concept that nature would have characteristics of its own is one of the main things that inspire poetry, and is the main factors of "metaphoric speech". if we take one passage out of william wordsworth sonnet's we can see how he directly links human characteristics to nature:
ReplyDelete"The fate of those old trees; and oft with pain
The traveller at this day will stop and gaze
On wrongs, which Nature scarcely seems to heed"
he links pain with the fate of trees, and pain is not something that trees would experience, and he also states that nature scarcely seems to pay attention or "heed" and this is also strictly a human/animal characteristic. However poets have also used nature to describe humans throughout history, this is passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at midnight" to demonstrate an example: "But thou, my babe ! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags : so shalt thou see and hear".
in this passage, samuel coleridge tries to describe his lover to be wondering around like breeze. so there you go my friend haha
I agree with what Shane and Seung Hee have said about the wind representing a female. Another sublime element in Percy Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ could be the sea. Shelley has given the Mediterranean Sea a human characteristic by calling the sea “his” and “he”, also leading us to believe the sea is male and has male qualities. Shelley then goes on to talk about the seas strength, “For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers, Cleave themselves into chasms”. Men are known to be the stronger sex, which is represented in these lines, saying that these weaker leaves have to stick themselves into the gorges that lie on the outskirts of the sea.
ReplyDeleteYou could also say that the leaves have been given a sublime element. Although Shelley hasn’t given the leaves a gender, he does refer to them as “their”. He also implies that they have human characteristics through calling the leaves ghosts, “Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”. Then again when he says “Pestilence-stricken multitudes”, stating that the leaves have been inflicted with a disease, and are dying by the masses. This reflection of how a population could be wiped out by a mass illness like the plague; is how we know Shelley has given them a sublime element. Furthermore Shelley writes that the leaves are “like a corpse within its grave”, and that “the sapless foliage of the ocean”. Indicating that the leaves are withered, lacking vitality and a spirit, which means they will be buried like a human body.
It's very interesting..to see how the leaves are identified as sublime element, and very funny how it has human characteristics..and I think it's such an interesting idea how the author has described the leaves as dead body..with no spirit, which means they are like humans when they die...
ReplyDeleteIn reply to Adnan
ReplyDeleteI think you misunderstood what I was saying, I was saying that the poem you first referred to (The Introduction) "Piping down the valley" etc contained no attempt to humanize nature like i said before, I think I laid it out pretty obviously. I think What you have done in your reply is taken what I said about Blakes "Introduction" and mistakenly believed I meant the same for the second poem.
As you said yourself the personification In Blakes "earth's Answer" is obvious I do not Disagree, I also think that it is "Obvious" that there is no personification in Blakes "Introduction".
As for Giving personalities to nature I agree with you, to put it in better words than i did before I simply don't like the idea of lets say making lightning "scared" for example unless, however for the purposes of poetry i can see that it has merit.